The Dutch Reach: A No-Tech Way to Save Bicyclists' Lives

Currently, the District of Columbia and 10 states, including Maryland, issue limited driving licenses to undocumented workers, with two more set to issue such licenses in the coming months.

Marquette County outmatched the rest of Wisconsin in binge-drinking rates back in 2005. By 2012, instead of going up by 5% like the rest of Wisconsin did, Marquette county reduced theirs by 15%. Evidence points to the Healthy Communities Healthy Youth initiative launched in 2003.

As a state with robust populations of wildlife, Montana has had its share of roadkill. Its Department of Transportation developed animal shelving, a type of wildlife crossing, to enable safe passage for small animals who need to cross the road. The measure, combined with other types of crossings, has reduced animal-vehicle collisions by half.

Many wildlife are killed each year as they are hit by cars when crossing highways. Montana built crossing structures over high risk sections of highways, such as grass covered tunnels, for animals to cross safely and reduce car accidents.

Sweden's "Vision Zero" program has used a comprehensive approach to infrastructure and regulation to drastically reduce traffic-related deaths, making Swedish roads the safest in the world.

Conventional merchants are afraid to lose parking spaces to bike parking or bike lanes. New York and Portland are finding cyclists increase local economies, and spend more money too.

Paris is a city plagued by traffic jams and air pollution. In 2007, the local government created a public bicycle sharing program called Velib that has drastically reduced the number of cars on the roadways and parking lots. During five years, over a hundred million people have used the program and it has a quarter of a million subscribers.

The overpopulation of white-tailed deer is a conservation realization and an environmental disaster for the communities that harbor them. Hastings-on-Hudson, a progressive community, has opted for a humane birth control method PZP that is injected by darts into does. The method is successful for its non-lethal approach and the population growth has slowed, but as of yet has not significantly decreased.

South Dakota’s “24/7 Sobriety” initiative breathalyzers tens of thousands of people every day in an effort to curb drunk driving. Rather than legislation that takes penalizes offenders by taking away their license, the state addresses the behavioral issue instead. In counties that use the “24/7 Sobriety,” they’ve seen a 12% decrease in repeat drunken-driving arrests.

Traffic fatality rates are slowly climbing in today's world of texting-while-driving. But highway agencies are increasingly using humor and wit to try to get people to drive safer.